#unfortunate implications

are there any Native people outside the Cession in the M:FS universe?

there's really no good answer here. if not- oh, they've been forced off their ancestral land and into a tiny single strip of the continent allowed them by the US government? wow that sounds uh. Not Great, although at least it's a sovereign nation

if so- does that mean Native witches have to serve in the US Army whether they want to or not? because of a treaty a British woman made with British colonial authorities on behalf of other British people? just so they can stay on their own land? y i k e s

someone didn't think this through in the writers' room

Then a couple days ago I saw a post rebuking that post's idea, stating vampires need blood to live and will die without it, therefore they also need to use a blood bank to avoid killing people, and that need to use blood banks could make vampirism a metaphor for disability. I will admit I skimmed the post because of the flawed premise but that's the gist of it.

Aside from the latter feeling like a bad faith reading of the former, it didn't sit right for me for reasons I needed to sort through first. Also not going to reblog the post because a) it would mean crawling through tumblr to find it again and b) I don't want to be that "interesting interpretation but..." reblogger.

General thoughts about a disability metaphor:

vampires are generally written somewhere between soulless monsters that eat humans, people fighting against their darker murderous urges, and people with a maneagable (potentially harmful) condition

i don't think i need to explain why "the blood-sucking parasites are disabled people" idea can carry all sorts of unfortunate implications

Not that I'm recommending others to go diving into podcasts about doomsday cults - you may all thank Kunihiko Ikuhara for sending me down the rabbit hole - but if you have to then The Last Podcast On The Left was the most bearable one as long as you can stomach the occasional pedo joke. I would know more peace if I hadn't subjected myself to hours of excerpts of Jim Jones' ravings, but morbid fascination is what it is.

I'm planning to leave it with the Heavens Gate episodes, but they gave me some Thoughts about the ending of the Agreste Arc that was probably completely unintentional on the writers' behalf. To note:

Gabriel and Tomoe's definitely cult-esque secret club which involves abandoning the self (by wearing uniforms and masks) and may or may not involve the idolisation of representatives of a species defined by their enslavement to magical objects

Gabriel and Tomoe's ideas about creating some superhuman race (core Heaven's Gate theology)

The fact that this superhuman race is created asexually (The Last Podcast guys have some interesting commentaries on this one)

lord but I can't remember if S5 ever said why it was that Tomoe was in on Gabriels BS, but the whole deal about AdriGami being the eternal icons of the perfect world or whatnot yeeeeah it reeks of millenarianism

(for those too lazy to google: the belief in "radical changes to society after a major cataclysm or transformative event")

Or as per the theology of Heaven's Gate: Earth was going to be "rebooted"

and what IS the end of the Agreste Arc but reality being started over to follow a similar-yet-fundamentelly different course corresponding to the idea of "perfection" held by the great leader of the whole conspiracy

Earth was recycled indeed

and I mean technically Gabriel, like Jones and Applewhite, takes a lot of people (all of humanity, in fact) along with him as he goes down. It's just that he's the only one who doesn't get replaced by a near-identitcal clone in the post-apocalyptic world